The present disclosure relates to a search apparatus, a search method, and a program, particularly, a search apparatus, a search method, and a program which make it possible to provide a convenient search result in voice search.
As a method of voice search that searches a string of words such as texts corresponding to a voice by using a voice input by a user, there is a method that uses a speech recognition apparatus alone (for example, see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application No. 2001-242884).
In the voice search using a speech recognition apparatus alone, an input voice is recognized with a line of words (vocabularies) registered in advance as the target of speech recognition result, such that the speech recognition result is output as a string of search result words that is the result of searching the string of words corresponding to the input voice.
Therefore, in the voice search using only the speech recognition apparatus, the string of words (also called a string of search result target words) that is the target of the search result of the string of words corresponding to the input voice is only a string of words (including one word herein) that is a line of words registered in advance in the dictionary as the target of the speech recognition result, such that the user's utterance is limited to the line of words registered in the dictionary to be used for speech recognition.
Recently, a method of voice search that is called voice search has been proposed.
In the voice search, a language model, such as N-gram, is used to perform continuous speech recognition, and the speech recognition result is matched with a text registered in a database (DB) prepared separately from a dictionary used for speech recognition (a text corresponding to the speech recognition result is searched from texts registered in the DB).
Further, the uppermost-ranked text or a text within the upper-N rank, which is matched with the speech recognition result, is output as a string of search result words, on the basis of the matching result.
In the voice search, since the text registered in the DB prepared separately from a dictionary used for speech recognition becomes the string of search result target words, it is possible to perform voice search, with a plurality of texts as strings of search result target words, by registering the texts in the DB.
In other words, according to the voice search, it is possible to perform voice search with some degree of accuracy within the texts registered in the DB as the strings of search result target words, even if a user utters words other than the words registered in a dictionary used for the speech recognition.
On the other hand, a method has been proposed in which texts for indexing is generated based on the voice in the multimedia file by performing speech recognition on the multimedia file storing voice and images and the voice in the multimedia file is searched based on the speaker identification (for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application No. 2003-348064).